Desdemona is dead. But only in death, four centuries since audiences first saw Othello suffocate the Venetian beauty on Shakespeare’s stage, can Desdemona ask why the Moor of Venice’s love swiftly turned to murderous rage.

In a new, 21st century concert-play called Desdemona, the women, the oppressed characters of Shakespeare’s play, finally talk back to the Bard, and question why the “quiet approval” of brotherhood meant Othello valued the antagonist Iago’s manipulation over Desdemona’s faithful love.

Desdemona – review

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The play is set in the afterlife, once Desdemona has met her untimely end. Inspired by the Congolese tradition of a shared space, where the living and the dead meet, Sellars’s setis made up of four grave sites, each topped with glassware, each with a microphone, the figures on stage lit like fine classical sculptures.

Crucially, this play introduces audiences to Desdemona’s African maid Barbary, played by Traoré who also sings on stage, accompanied by string instruments (n’goni and kora) and two backing vocalists from Mali.

Wrongly renamed Barbara by modern editors in her mentions in Shakespeare’s text, according to Sellars, Barbary raised Desdemona and taught her how to love. In the afterlife, the maid now tells her mistress her real name: Sa’ran. It transpires that Desdemona had spent a lifetime blind to the fact her beloved Barbary was a slave, robbed of her identity.

Malian singer/songwriter Rokia Traoré in performance for Desdemona, part of this year’s Melbourne and Sydney festivals Photograph: Mark Allan/Supplied

Sellars first met Morrison, the esteemed African-American author of novels such as Sula, Beloved and Song of Solomon, when she invited the director to work on his 1998 Ming dynasty opera The Peony Pavilion at the Princeton Atelier she had co-founded at Princeton University.

In 2009, Sellars would go on to stage a futuristic, high-tech Othello “for the Obama generation” in New York, starring John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman – but not before the director had begun a long debate with Morrison about the contemporary worth of the play itself.

Morrison had thought Othello still a useful play; Sellars for many years had not been convinced. “I was annoyed at this play [Othello], and really felt Shakespeare didn’t know any black people, and that showed,” Sellars says speaking from his office at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Updating Othello’s setting for performances in 2009, with Barack Obama now the 44th US president, helped to change Sellars’s mind: the original play was indeed relevant. “Suddenly you saw a black man [Obama] who had arrived at the highest position of power and everybody in power, including his friends, was working to undermine him.”

Sellars says Othello, like The Merchant of Venice, becomes a “nightmare racist play” if staged “the wrong way”. Shakespeare wasn’t racist: rather, he was an “unbelievably subtle” writer. But Othello can be “frustrating” to stage today, he says, given there is so much more to say about African experience and imperialism.

“I really wanted Toni to challenge Shakespeare’s blind spots, his missing links and missing information … for Toni, the power of Shakespeare’s play is Iago’s language, that these people don’t kill the thing you love; they convince you to kill the thing you love.”

Morrison set about writing the invisible histories of Desdemona, Othello and Barbary, which both writer and director now hope will be taught in schools alongside Shakespeare’s text. Morrison told The New York Times: “I had to find my own kind of language that was worthy of the characters.”

Sellars was aware of Rokia Traoré’s reputation as a cosmopolitan African singer-songwriter, and introduced the Mali-born and based performer to Morrison. Traoré and Morrison bonded and formed an enduring friendship.

While writing Desdemona, Morrison would email Traoré pages of script, and Traoré would send back MP3 files of songs and lyrics in her Bambara language. The lyrics were then translated into English, and edited by Morrison.

“After talking to Peter, Toni thought, ‘Yes, I would like to know more about Othello, I would like to know more about Barbary, and what were Desdemona’s thoughts and feelings about what happened’,” says Traoré.

“This was the origin of [the play] Desdemona: giving words to those who were not allowed [to speak] in Shakespeare’s work. Shakespeare is still everything we know today, this exceptional author, but this is what he knew about Africa centuries ago …

“When I talked to Toni the first time, she told me about this affair – because it was like an affair between Toni and Peter; it was like a challenge to Peter, she wanted Peter to think,” Traoré laughs.

“It was a privilege for me: Toni Morrison is Toni Morrison, you know? Especially for someone like me, an African woman in music and culture in general, having Toni’s opinion, for me this project is like I had an opportunity to study in a university full of great teachers.”

Says Sellars: “So many of our images of Africa are trapped people, and we don’t recognise the cosmopolitanism that is at the heart of so much African culture. Rokia, speaking up powerfully for the rights of women, and with a clear, liberated, feminist point of view, comes from the heart of Africa.

“Then there’s Rokia’s music. There are no drums, there is no dance music. Most [western] people don’t associate Africa with intimate, private, personal music. It’s a deeply introspective, quiet meditation that most people haven’t heard, but goes next to a Beethoven piano sonata any day.”

Desdemona will be on at Melbourne’s Southbank theatre from 16 to 19 October as part of Melbourne festival. It will also be on at Sydney’s Roslyn Packer theatre from 23 to 25 October, as a special Sydney festival presentation